Hansbrough boys: Pride of Poplar Bluff
North Carolina, Mississippi State standouts making Missouri friends proud
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“Both the kids get a lot of attention from everybody around here,” said John David Pattillo, the boys’ former high school coach. “But Tyler being at North Carolina and being on television all the time is a little different. We get to see Ben’s games on the Internet, and some people travel down to see him play. But it is crazy with Tyler… but our community is definitely Tyler and North Carolina crazy. My nine year old daughter Gabby has a little eraser board and writes down on it when all his games will be played. But for our entire community, we’re pretty excited about the tournament. People are driving down to see both kids play in the tournament. Everyone’s making plans.”
Making plans for Doc Hansbrough is a bit complicated. Last week when the boys were both in conference tournaments in different cities, Hansbrough had a good friend who owns a private plane and flew him between Charlotte for the ACC tournament and Atlanta for the SEC tournament on alternating days. This weekend, Doc Hansbrough had to chose because the boys are playing on the same day. “I’m going to Tyler’s games this week because last week Ben was the priority. We’ll have other family in Little Rock.”
But most of all, if you really need to understand how the legend of “Pyscho-T” and baby brother Ben got started, you need to go into the house on the cul-de-sac with the basketball court taking up most of the backyard. It is in this place that the legend really lives. Gene Hansbrough takes you down the stairs to a finished basement that is the most unconventional “finished” basement you’ll ever see. The basement is a fully equipped exercise torture chamber, complete with rubber padded floors, sophisticated free weight contraptions, loud music and all sorts of plyometric devises stacked in orderly piles. “When they were young, I had two mini basketball goals down here. I padded the poles and Tyler and Greg just went at it,” Gene Hansbrough laughs.
The walls of the Hansbrough house are lined with photos of the boys in various athletic exploits. There is Greg completing his first marathon. There is Gene competing as a 7-foot-2-inch high jumper and former Big 8 champ at Missouri. There is Ben shooting a jumper in his Poplar Bluff jersey and another one in his Mississippi State gear. But most of the wall is devoted to the All-America Tyler showing him with that bug-eyed, “Psycho-T” ferocity.
Gene chuckles whenever anyone asks where that competitiveness came from. His friends point towards him, but he says he has little to do with it. “I never saw it coming, because he was such a shy young man as a child. He never spoke a word,” said Gene. “Then he started playing soccer when he was about 5 years old and he was just a demon. He’d just run and run and run and he’d get the ball in the goal no matter who was in front of him, and I discovered he was just a totally different person when he played sports. He was so intense that I’d have to take him out of games just so he could cool down and I could get some fluids in him. I’d make him sit down under a tree and even then, the only thing he’d say was, ‘Dad I want to go back in. I want to go back in.’”
But there was a time when the Hansbrough boys lost that edge. About 13 or 14 years ago, Gene made a mistake of buying a video game when the boys were in grade school. Then on one perfect summer day Gene pulled into the driveway and he was confused.
There was no one outside on the basketball court. When he came in the house and opened the basement door, he heard no noise down there, either. He found the boys upstairs glued to the TV set and they had been playing Super Mario Brothers for hours.
“I got rid of the game right then and there,” said Gene. “Called it a big W.O.T… waste of time. Unplugged it from the wall, took it back to the store and the boys were like, ‘what are we going to do now?’ I told them, ‘go outside. Go down stairs. Just get out and play.’”
“I think they missed that stupid video game for about two days,” said Gene Hansbrough. “They’ve been playing the real games ever since.”
Bryan Burwell writes regularly for NBCSports.com and is a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
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